History Of Civil War Research Articles

New Perspectives on the Union War ed. by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon

Reviewed by: New Perspectives on the Union War ed. by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon Matthew Mason (bio) New Perspectives on the Union War. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Pp. 256. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) This is an unusually cohesive edited collection, speaking to one over-arching theme: the many faces of the Union cause in the American Civil War. The editors’ own previous pathbreaking work on this theme and the contributors’ tight connections to the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia make the thematic unity unsurprising. But less guaranteed was the high quality of the essays across the board, and the wide variety of viewpoints on the Union cause that they represent. The collective and individual excellence of the essays takes two important forms. First, although they range widely in subject matter, they all make key contributions to the volume. Even essays that seem like the answer to the question, Which one of these things is not like the other?— like Tamika Y. Nunley’s exploration of the Civil War career of free black Washington, D.C., fixture Elizabeth Keckly or Michael T. Caires’s essay on Salmon P. Chase’s pursuit of a national banking system—add key elements to the book’s whole picture. Second, they all make important interventions in other historiographies. For instance, Frank J. Cirillo’s discussion of Abby Kelley Foster’s and Stephen Foster’s wartime careers seeks to qualify the idea, associated most strongly with James Oakes, that the war was antislavery for Republicans from the beginning. Jack Furniss’s close attention to Horatio Seymour’s political appeal seeks to focus wartime northern political history less on voters’ reactions against the Republicans than on their positive support for Democrats. D. H. Dilbeck applies the much-studied Francis Lieber’s [End Page 414] ideas to questioning the “dark turn” in Civil War historiography. Even Peter C. Luebke’s essay, which at its outset seems like the least significant historiographical foray because he examines the regimental histories that Gallagher uses to such effect in his Union War (2011), ends up speaking effectively to the massive literature on postwar memory. The volume shines unprecedented light on the wide range of political viewpoints housed in the big tent that was the Union war. The editors begin their laudably brief and insightful introduction with William Tecumseh Sherman’s statement that “the National Feeling . . . assumes various shapes, but always comes back to that of Union” (1). The shapes represented here include the views of radical abolitionists, free African Americans, Democrats both Protestant and Catholic, Republicans of all factions, and veterans of various political stripes. And the issues with which they were concerned also ran a full gamut; as Caires phrases it, “concern for Union” included but “extended far beyond the political sphere or the battlefield” (160). These essays display the depths of division over fundamental questions within that broad Unionist persuasion. So, for instance, we see Furniss’s Seymour and Jesse George-Nichol’s Edward Bates asserting that a conservative approach to the war dictated a limited, cautious strategy, while Dilbeck’s Lieber insisted that “the more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief ” (144). And all but the most conservative of these Unionists embraced the idea of emancipation in the abstract, but as Furniss puts it well, “questions of timing and method were critical” for all of them (79). Another major point of variance was the degree to which these characters thought of the war to preserve the Union as an end in itself or as a means to some other end. The Fosters, for example, “cast their patriotism as support not for the Union as it was but for the Union as it should be,” entirely free of the stain of slavery (10). Salmon P. Chase and his supporters wielded Unionism to tar opponents of the national banking system with the brush of “South Carolina treason” (177). Likewise, Keckly and her collaborators sought to leverage the war to advance the rights of African Americans both free and...

“The Russian land is going through hard times”: diary of the priest of the 3rd Barnaul Siberian rifle regiment K. Dmitriev

we publish new source on the history of the Russian Civil war – the diary of regimental priest K. Dmitriev. This diary is a kind of chronicle of combat path of the 3rd Barnaul Siberian rifle regiment of the Kolchak army for December 1918 – June 1919.

Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South

Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South

Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future

The story has been retold so often that Civil War historians and enthusiasts know it by heart: in spring 1861, eager volunteers flocked to enlist before they missed out on what everyone knew would be a short and triumphant war. Instead, the boys of 1861 plunged into a grinding bloodbath that shattered their innocence and forged a modern nation. This account is not pure fiction, but, as Jason Phillips shows, it is woefully incomplete, not least because it privileges the views of zealous young white men over those of other Americans, from enslaved people who prayed for “jubilee” to border-state citizens who feared Armageddon. Yet Phillips goes far beyond myth busting in this superbly crafted book. By exploring how religion, material culture, and notions of time shaped Americans' prognostications, he weaves diverse forecasts into a sophisticated study that makes an excellent contribution to Civil War historiography. The book ranges widely, from the concept of the universal telegraph to the career of the self-styled prophet Edmund Ruffin, but several key themes tie it together. One is the distinction between two temporalities: anticipation and expectation. Anticipators believed that they forged their own futures through proactive effort, while expectant Americans envisioned future events, already determined by forces beyond human control, moving toward them. Given the realities of antebellum law and culture, it would be tempting to generalize anticipation as male, white, and martial, and expectation as female, black, and civilian. But Phillips identifies patterns without putting people in boxes. Few Americans struck more boldly for anticipated freedom than Harriet Tubman, while Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth spent much of the war expecting a grim future. War itself could wrench people from one temporality to another, humbling the anticipations of glory-seeking soldiers or enabling enslaved people to grasp a freedom they long expected would come in God's own time.

Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps. By Amy Murrell Taylor

Over the past decade, Civil War historians have debated the so-called “dark turn” in the field as studies of the war’s intended and unintended consequences on the lives of soldiers and civilians alike have challenged the conventional narratives of the Civil War as “a new birth of freedom” (as Abraham Lincoln had declared in the Gettysburg Address). Some scholars, such as Jim Downs, Thavolia Glymph, and Gretchen Long, have argued that while the military may have driven the final nail in slavery’s coffin, historians have overlooked the limitations of military emancipation and the ways that enslaved people struggled to survive in southern war zones plagued by violence and disease. Others believe that a focus on the wartime struggles of enslaved people has resulted in an overly negative perception of the Union Army and reveals an essential lack of understanding about how the army functions. As Gary Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier wrote in the Journal of the Civil War Era in December 2014, “military history has become more diluted and orientated toward the oppressed and damaged, appearing more palatable but also requiring less expertise in actual military institutions and their histories” (492).

Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America

Book Review| July 01 2019 Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America. By John Loughery. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. 424 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.95 (cloth). William B. Kurtz William B. Kurtz University of Virginia William B. Kurtz serves as Managing Director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America (Fordham University Press, 2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2019) 38 (4): 96–98. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.38.4.0096 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation William B. Kurtz; Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2019; 38 (4): 96–98. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.38.4.0096 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Connecting Theory and Practice: Using Place-Based Learning in Teacher Professional Development

ABSTRACTIn collaboration with historic sites in Washington, DC, that have shared commitments to place-based and experiential learning, Ford’s Theatre teaches K-12 educators about Civil War history through engagements with places, artifacts, stories, and enduring conflicts that can be made relevant to students’ lives. In this article, we provide program descriptions and findings from a program evaluation to articulate how Ford’s and its partners both model and teach historical empathy, community building, and reflective practice as they strengthen teachers’ historical knowledge, pedagogical tool kits, and professional networks.

THE NASTY WAR: ORGANISED VIOLENCE DURING THE ANYA-NYA INSURGENCY IN SOUTH SUDAN, 1963–72

AbstractIn 1963, unrest in Sudan's three southern provinces (today's South Sudan) escalated into a civil war between the government and the Anya-Nya rebellion. The subsequent eight years of violence has hitherto largely escaped scrutiny from academic researchers and has remained a subject of popular imagination and politicised narratives. This article demonstrates how this history can be explored with greater nuance, thereby establishing a local history of a postcolonial civil war. Focusing on the garrison town of Torit, our research reveals a localised and personalised rebellion, made up of a constellation of parochial armed groups. This new history also demonstrates how these parties built upon experiences from imperial conquest and colonial rule when entrenching violent wartime practices such as mass displacement and encampment, the raising of local militias and intelligence networks, and the deliberate starvation of civilians — all common methods in subsequent wars.

Ebola: Es ist nicht nur die Krankheit – Herausforderungen beim Anpassen der humanitären Hilfe an ihren Kontext

The 2013 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa has highlighted the importance of adapting humanitarian responses to new socio-cultural contexts. The international humanitarian community was not only confronted with poor health infrastructure but also the challenge of local socio-cultural practices, which aggravated the spread of the Ebola virus. This paper discusses the Ebola crisis in Liberia from a socio-cultural perspective and highlights how the lack of information, neglect and criminalising of traditional practices, the history of civil war and the absence of trust in government limit the success of humanitarian assistance. This article provides an analysis of allows for an analysis of humanitarian assistance within the context of the increasing complexity of disasters and changing contexts.

"Deeds of Brave Suffering and Lofty Heroism": Martialised Rhetoric and Kentucky Soldiers

"Deeds of Brave Suffering and Lofty Heroism":Martialised Rhetoric and Kentucky Soldiers Lesley J. Gordon (bio) Civil War historians have devoted considerable attention to the topic of courage, though they have showed far less interest in its antithesis, cowardice. Soldiers themselves certainly talked about it. As James McPherson notes in his seminal book, For Cause and Comrades, letters and diaries included frequent references to "courage, bravery, and valor—the three words meant the same thing." But, he adds, they "wrote even more about cowardice—the mark of dishonor."1 Historian Gerald Linderman further observes in Embattled Courage, it was cowardly for soldiers to "feel fear" and to express it.2 "Playing the coward," whether it was a single soldier or an entire regiment, was deemed deeply shameful and base.3 An 1863 letter to the New York Times, for example, explained: "The world has always specially honored courage and stigmatized cowardice. To be brave is as essential for a man as to be chaste is for a woman, and a coward among men is [End Page 179] in as poor repute as a prostitute among women."4 The repercussions of such a perceived crime on the battlefield could be devastating. Chris Walsh, who has authored the only book length study on the topic, states that there was an accepted belief, at least early in the war, that, "a man who was a coward in war would be a coward everywhere else."5 According to Walsh, the "only definitive way to refute the charge of cowardice" was to engage "in combat."6 Through blood sacrifice as evidenced by battle wounds, tattered flags, and high casualty numbers, an individual or an entire unit could dispel questions about their worthiness as soldiers and as men. Accusing a native-born white man, notably a southern white man, of cowardly behavior was a serious challenge to the careful construction of gender, race, and power dynamics that undergirded honor-coded slave society. In the context of the American Civil War, labels like "coward" and "hero," were so omnipresent in the martial rhetoric that they can almost be taken for granted. However, by examining them critically, we can better understand the constructed jingoistic narratives that spurred and spurned men to battle.7 As this terrible war raged, these words were no less powerful, but their meaning grew less clear when contrasted with the ruthless reality of military service. One historian explains, "the very nature of combat did not fit and could not be made to fit, within the framework of soldier expectations."8 Digitized documents allow for a more careful survey of such words and their impact. Historians can track specific words and phrases and their frequency to better understand their context. Before the [End Page 180] increased digitization of primary documents, it was far more laborious and time consuming to try to quantify word use in this manner—although it certainly was attempted.9 In this case, exploring the topic of "cowardice" electronically as it relates to a particular Kentucky regiment is revealing in terms of what technology can—and cannot do. Utilizing the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK) database, I began by simply searching words: "coward," and "cowardly," but also contemporary synonyms such as "poltroon," "dastard," "skulker," "shirker," or "croaker," as well as words like "shame," "disgrace," "fled," or "retreat" and terms such as "white feather."10 Preliminary searching of these terms did not uncover obvious examples of Kentucky soldiers accused of cowardice, though there is evidence of the word's significance and power. An 1859 petition to Governor Beriah Magoffin, for example, recounted the murder of a man named Harmon who had cajoled and taunted his killer, calling him a "damned coward."11 On Election Day 1860, Phillip Metz sought to protect his brother from a "melee" by seizing the attacker's "billey." Charged with concealing a weapon, Metz declared in his petition to the governor that "when a Brother is assaulted with a deadley weppon, it is cowardly, and unbecoming a son of Kentucky to not attempt a resque."12 In another instance, William McMullen, indicted for "Breach of [End Page 181] the Peace," petitioned Governor Magoffin in August...

Gettysburg Contested:150 Years of Preserving America’s Cherished Landscape

Civil War historians have produced no fewer than 6,000 books on the Gettysburg Campaign, saturating the Gettysburg historiography and feeding our seemingly endless fascination with the three-day battle. Recent scholarship has focused on Gettysburg in memory, including an exploration of the process of preserving and interpreting America’s most popular battlefield. In Gettysburg Contested, Brian Black, an environmental historian at Penn State University’s campus in Altoona, focuses on the process of preserving the battlefield from 1863 to the battle’s sesquicentennial in 2013. As Black states, the vision for the book came from “a personal need to understand the ongoing effort to re-create the Battlefield of Gettysburg landscape of 1863” (10).

Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat by Jonathan M. Steplyk

Reviewed by: Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat by Jonathan M. Steplyk Earl J. Hess Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers and the Nature of Combat. Jonathan M. Steplyk. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018. ISBN 978-0-7006-2628-1, 336 pp., cloth, $29.95. Civil War soldiers worried a good deal about being targets of enemy fire in battle, but we tend to ignore that at least some of them were also concerned about their roles as killers. Jonathan M. Steplyk deserves credit for bringing this idea to our attention. He is not the first; several other Civil War historians have touched on the topic within the context of books on other subjects. But Steplyk is the first to write a dedicated study of killing in the Civil War. He was inspired by Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning How to Kill in War and Society (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009). Steplyk set out to write a “killogy” of the Civil War. At heart, his book deals with Civil War soldiers and “explores their attitudes to and experiences of killing in combat.” A key component of his work is to “document the spectrum of these attitudes and experiences as recorded by the soldiers” (6). Steplyk concludes that the great majority of Federals and Confederates “positively affirmed and accepted killing the enemy as part of their military duty and a necessity” (7). But he also finds that “a significant minority harbored doubts about or outright objected to killing in war.” (Even so most of the men who doubted the morality of killing even in wartime “tended to fight just as purposefully” despite their ambivalence [7].) Generally seeing no difference between Union and Confederate soldiers, Steplyk nevertheless points out that the latter often cited defense of their homes and their hatred of seeing blacks in blue uniform as motivations for embracing the role of killer on the battlefield. Steplyk identifies ideology, religion, the gun culture of pre–Civil War America, and other influences as context to understand why most law-abiding citizens willingly learned how to kill. He recognizes that some soldiers easily adapted to the role of killer while others had a good deal of trouble, viewing the matter as a spectrum rather than a cut-and-dried concept. Steplyk was greatly influenced by Grossman’s book, even though, as he notes, Grossman paid little attention to the Civil War, focusing mostly on twentieth-century wars. More importantly, Steplyk states that many of Grossman’s conclusions about the Civil War are erroneous. This book is significant because it introduces an important topic in Civil War [End Page 103] soldier studies, one that needed to be brought into the discussion about the combat experience of the war. But it has many limitations, the most important of which is that it rests too much on the surface and on the periphery of the topic. Several chapters are devoted to killing’s context without focusing on its psychology. For example, when Steplyk writes about hand-to-hand combat, or the presence of black troops on the battlefield, or informal truces, he simply writes about those topics rather than reminding the reader that his objective is to discuss the act of killing within these subjects. In short, context tends to dominate this book and overwhelm the central subject. One finishes his book feeling as if the heart of the topic has not been reached. The idea of a “killogy” has wonderful potential for connecting with a range of other topics in Civil War studies, including the culture of death, the range at which combat normally took place, and Civil War memory, to name a few. While Steplyk often touches on these other themes, he does not fully explore the connections between them and his central subject. Most importantly, the subject of killing in war cries out for interdisciplinary research; the academic literature in psychology and social science would have something to say about it. I do not think the historian has all the concepts or training necessary to do the subject justice. Hopefully, someone will build on Steplyk’s work and try to...

The Seventh West Virginia Infantry: An Embattled Union Regiment from the Civil War's Most Divided State by David W. Mellott and Mark A. Snell

Reviewed by: The Seventh West Virginia Infantry: An Embattled Union Regiment from the Civil War's Most Divided State by David W. Mellott and Mark A. Snell Glenn Longacre Archivist The Seventh West Virginia Infantry: An Embattled Union Regiment from the Civil War's Most Divided State. By David W. Mellott and Mark A. Snell. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. Pp. 354.) It is not an understatement to say that David W. Mellott's and Mark A. Snell's regimental history marks a seminal turning point in West Virginia's Civil War historiography. A century-long drought existed between when the few regimental histories produced by the veterans themselves, along with Theodore Lang's admirable but imperfect Loyal West Virginia (1895), were published and the appearance of Mellott's and Snell's history. It can be argued that The Seventh West Virginia Infantry represents the first scholarly, book-length account of a West Virginia regiment ever written. The authors tap a number of primary sources compiled from military service and pension records at the National Archives, research Mellott conducted on his own family connections to the Seventh West Virginia, statistical data compiled under Snell's directorship at the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War at Shepherd University, manuscript [End Page 78] collections, the Official Records, and contemporary newspapers such as the venerable Wheeling Intelligencer. The first two chapters, presented against the backdrop of western Virginia's separation from Virginia, largely concentrate on the regiment's recruitment, organization, and early skirmishes from 1861 until mid-1862. One of the characteristics unique to many Loyal Virginia (later West Virginia) regiments was that not only did Virginians enlist, but Ohioans from Monroe County largely made up Companies D and G, while Pennsylvanians from Greene County, filled the ranks of Companies E and F. These men, along with a fair number of immigrants, rounded out the regiment's complement. Through Mellott's and Snell's documentation of the Seventh's recruitment, they offer a tantalizing glimpse into a question that Civil War historians, to a large degree, have ignored: why did hundreds of men from Ohio and Pennsylvania willingly serve in Loyal Virginia regiments? Generally, the simple answer given is that Ohio and Pennsylvania had filled their quotas and turned these men away, but did regional identity and socioeconomic relationships play a larger role than historians have ventured to say? Mellott's and Snell's research doesn't come to any conclusions on this point, but their work does provide the foundations for further inquiry. The bulk of Mellott's and Snell's book, however, is rightfully devoted to the Seventh's esteemed combat record. Assigned early in 1862 to guard the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in western Virginia, the Seventh engaged in skirmishes with regular Confederate forces and guerillas. Subsequently, as part of General James Shields's division, the regiment fought against Stonewall Jackson's forces in the Shenandoah Valley. In July 1862, the Seventh West Virginia Infantry was permanently transferred to the Army of the Potomac. It participated in the waning stages of McClellan's failed Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Day's Battles. At the Sunken Road at Antietam, on September 17, 1862, it suffered its largest number of casualties: thirty killed in action, seven mortally wounded, and seventy-seven wounded. After Antietam, the Seventh fought in the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and perhaps, its finest hour, at Cemetery Ridge on July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg. The following year the Seventh fought in the battles of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and at Petersburg. Along with the rest of the Army of the Potomac, the regiment found itself at Appomattox Court House in April 1865, when General Lee's forces surrendered. By the war's end, the regiment had become the fledgling state's most storied regiment. Its participation in some of the most hard-fought battles of the war ensured that it lived up to its self-proclaimed sobriquet, The Bloody Seventh. [End Page 79] The book's epilogue discusses the Seventh West Virginia Infantry in history and memory. It focuses on the regiment's veterans and their attempt to assimilate into civilian life after...

Dwelling in the Digital Archive: A Meditation on the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Project

Dwelling in the Digital Archive:A Meditation on the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Project Stephen Berry (bio) I have said elsewhere that if history is my religion, the archive is my church and research is my sacrament (and my penance). I never feel myself so much at home as when I am entombed with my dead in some archival catacombs, convinced I am searching for their humanity, knowing I am searching for my own. To be an archive rat, said Derrida, "is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive, right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there's too much of it. . . . It is to have a compulsive, repetitive . . . irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for . . . the most archaic place of absolute commencement." As historians, the archive is our psychic headwaters. For narrow professional reasons, we go to answer research questions, but we know the pilgrimage runs deeper. We aren't looking for data. We're looking for Revelation. Like time-tripping flaneurs, we watch the dead live their lives, not as we live ours, and we revel in the differences, inspired by all that we have to live up to, ashamed of all we need to live down. This encounter, Carolyn Steedman tells us, is physical. The dead press their concerns upon us, and we come away with their dust in our lungs. Keats used to say that when he came home from a party he felt a little lost. "Myself [does not go] home [End Page 161] to myself," he marveled, "but the identity of everyone in the room begins so to press upon me, that I am in a very little annihilated." We go to the archive to be multiplied. We go to be annihilated.1 Somehow these metaphysical rites coexist with our rising skepticism of the archive itself. (We love our god, but we doubt it too.) The 'archival turn' is relatively old now I know. Derrida published Archive Fever in 1995. Ann Stoler's "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance" came out in 2002, the same year as Steedman's Dust. Summarizing the general line of thought—that archives encode and enshrine Power—Stoler noted: "Scholars need to move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject. . . . [We need to] view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production . . . [as] cultural agents of 'fact' production [and] state authority." While this thinking may be more than twenty years old, there are reasons to believe that we are in the middle and not the end of that turn. First, as Civil War historians we continue to unspool precisely how insights that were originally framed by debates over colonialism can be best applied in a related but not synonymous context. The Civil War was absolutely a war for empire—a war to determine which imperial model would prevail in the west—but as a war we fought against ourselves there are peculiar archival dynamics to what records got made and saved and put to what purposes. Second, as the country has lurched to the dystopian right, the urge to interrogate inherited structures, especially structures of information, has deepened. Every generation takes on inequality, and each finds it rooted deeper than they originally thought. At least since Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1985), there has been a debate over whether the archive really can be read 'against the grain' of the forces that created it. Third, and most important, the digital turn allows us for the first time to create our [End Page 162] own archives. Some we might call archival-boutique—archives of coroners' reports, say, or letters from transitionally literate Civil War soldiers—projects that search for needles in the haystacks of other archives and use them to create a haystack of needles. Other digital archives, like Valley of the Shadow or the Civil War Governors of Kentucky (CWGK), create an archive where what is being privileged is not a record type but a peculiar vantage—a sort of transect or view, a gubernatorial panopticon or the line of...

Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research by Paul D. Escott

Reviewed by: Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research by Paul D. Escott Jason Phillips Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research. By Paul D. Escott. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018. Pp. 188.) Recently, Civil War historians have revolutionized their field by asking new questions, introducing fresh methods, collecting unexamined sources, and challenging conclusions and narratives. In the process, they have founded new journals, pioneered digital humanities, engaged the public, and expanded their subject. When fields experience such growth, they need books like this one that evaluate new directions and propose unexamined ones. In Rethinking the Civil War Era, Paul Escott surveys an impressive range of recent work. His astute insights make this a welcome volume for all Civil War historians but especially for scholars embarking on their careers and looking for a source to survey the field. Escott divides the book into thematic chapters that reflect his research interests instead of promising a comprehensive review of the field’s massive historiography. When assessing work on the sectional crisis, Escott divides scholarship into two categories, histories that probe events and groups from the inside out to clarify individual motivations and contingencies versus works that explain the era from the outside in to reveal compelling forces behind sectionalism. The field’s recent focus on transnational political developments and global economies favors the outside in approach. Escott praises this trend but encourages historians to study nationalism in both regions and explain how internal diversities affected national feelings. The most thorough chapters analyze subjects that Escott has contributed to the most, namely wartime society and African Americans. Guerrilla violence, desertion, home-front privation, class disorder, emancipation, and a host of other circumstances destabilized southern society and challenged the legitimacy of Confederate governments. But Escott observes, “The fact that the North won has too often diverted attention from the rents sustained in its social fabric” (43). White supremacy, charges of disloyalty, riots, and economic distress tested northern society, which affected the identities of political parties and national definitions of citizenship. Since the 1970s, historians have persuasively argued that African Americans were [End Page 112] central to the war’s origins, meaning, conduct, and consequences. While this work has established a black presence within the war’s larger stories, Escott notes that historians have missed diversities among African American groups and conditions. We need more research on the relationships between a wide spectrum of black people: from elite, black abolitionists and refugees in contraband camps to free black women and the millions of slaves who still prayed for freedom at the end of the war. The diversity of experiences among these groups raise “questions of how and to what extent they constituted a single social entity that we label with the words African American” (45). In chapters on military, digital, and environmental history, Escott identifies many opportunities for new research. Problems of high command and politicized armies, logistics and resources, and the military’s effects on postwar culture deserve more attention. Digital history has generated new data and questions. Escott highlights a number of ongoing projects that will deepen our understanding of military occupation, emancipation, guerrilla strategy, African American migration, and other large processes that can be illuminated by crowd-sourcing work, sharing findings, and displaying results in visual formats. Among many recommendations for the digital humanities, Escott urges scholars to standardize databases, tools, and software to enable compatibility and sharing and calls for someone to maintain a current registry of digital projects to encourage cooperation and disseminate knowledge. Like digital history, Civil War environmental history has expanded dramatically in recent years. Beyond studying geography and terrain from a military perspective, historians have explored the war’s climate, weather, animals, diseases, deforestation, pollution, and other natural elements that place humanity and history within living ecosystems. This fascinating work often requires interdisciplinary methods for understanding dynamic relationships. Escott notes that the war’s environmental legacy transcended southern destruction by also affecting northern attitudes of nature and western preservation. Finally, Escott evaluates new scholarship on the war’s outcomes. Much of this work focuses on the power of the federal government to enforce laws in the South and West. When we expand the temporal...

Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War ed. by Andrew S. Bledsoe, Andrew F. Lang

Reviewed by: Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War ed. by Andrew S. Bledsoe, Andrew F. Lang Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War. Edited by Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andrew F. Lang. Foreword by Gary W. Gallagher. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 304. $48.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6977-3.) The state-of-the-field military history essays authored by Gary W. Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier in the Journal of the Civil War Era and Earl J. Hess in Civil War History in 2014 caused an uncommon stir among historians. Both pieces acknowledged the benefits of a wide aperture in defining the purpose and provenance of military history as a scholarly genre, but (among other points) they also dared to assert that traditional military history inhabited a marginal position in the world of academics, with deleterious consequences for the larger goal of rigorously understanding the American Civil War in all its aspects. Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War, a collection of essays edited by two established but not yet senior scholars, thus sets foot on fraught historiographical terrain. Many of the collection’s contributors are also in the middle of their careers, and the volume serves as a proxy of sorts for the field’s future. Much to their credit, the editors succeed in this volume at least in productively bridging the divide between “drum-and-trumpet histories and the more theoretical war-and-society approaches that sometimes minimize or circumvent military considerations” (p. 7). The pieces testify to the field’s diverse set of interests. Strong essays on army command from Andrew S. Bledsoe and Jennifer M. Murray represent operational military history. Kenneth W. Noe’s piece on the effects of weather in the [End Page 924] Peninsula campaign is splendid, and an essay by John J. Hennessy on the sack of Fredericksburg continues a productive strand of scholarship on “hard war” and the question of whether (and how) Civil War violence was limited. Andrew F. Lang authors a related piece on the relationship between ideas of American exceptionalism and military occupation. Three chapters by Brian D. McKnight, Kevin M. Levin, and Brian Matthew Jordan cover different aspects of Civil War violence and its effects as seen in guerrilla warfare, executions of deserters, and the long lingering effects of battlefield trauma, respectively. There is also an essay by Keith Altavilla on understudied Democrats in the Union army during the election of 1864 and a concluding piece by Robert L. Glaze on Albert Sidney Johnston’s hitherto neglected place in Lost Cause memorialization. It is impossible to do justice to each individual essay, but they are each concise enough for readers to consider directly. Nevertheless, the pessimistic tone of Earl J. Hess’s essay in this volume, which lays out a research agenda for operational military history, remains unanswered by the larger field. Hess rightly identifies a deficit in academic scholarship on important topics such as field artillery and cavalry, never mind important support services like logistics. Even operational military historians have not paid as much attention as they should to the transportation and administrative infrastructure needed to project military power across vast distances—a phenomenon vital not only in the American Civil War but also in other contemporary conflicts such as the Taiping Civil War and the German Wars of Unification. Modernity, empire, cultural distinctions between wartime and peacetime, and American exceptionalism (or lack thereof) are issues that implicitly or explicitly loom over the larger field—but those themes rely on assumptions about the practical workings of Civil War armies that could be more thoroughly tested in the same way that Hess and other historians have scrutinized the significance of the rifled musket. Regardless, while debates over the past, present, and future of the field of military history will continue for the foreseeable future, there should at least be a consensus that this volume of essays represents a fine contribution to the larger body...

A Forgotten Front: Florida During the Civil War Era ed. by Seth A. Weitz and Jonathan C. Sheppard

Reviewed by: A Forgotten Front: Florida During the Civil War Era ed. by Seth A. Weitz and Jonathan C. Sheppard Wesley Moody A Forgotten Front: Florida During the Civil War Era. Edited by Seth A. Weitz and Jonathan C. Sheppard. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 258. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1982-3.) A Forgotten Front: Florida During the Civil War Era is a collection of ten essays about different aspects of Florida and the Civil War. Of the eleven states that seceded, it seems that the least has been written about Florida. Thus, any work on Florida's Civil War history is welcome. The subjects covered in A Forgotten Front seem almost random. It appears that the editors chose the writers first, as opposed to choosing the subject and seeking out the expert. That is not necessarily negative. In this case, it has led to an interesting selection of essays, but this collection should not be the first book anyone interested in Florida's role in the American Civil War should read. The book is not a general overview, as the title leads readers to believe. As with any collection of essays, the quality of contributions varies. R. Boyd Murphree offers an excellent chapter on Governor John Milton and the many problems he faced as the chief executive of a militarily weak and vulnerable state. Seth A. Weitz, one of the coeditors, uses the Compromise of 1850 to explain politics in antebellum Florida. He convincingly argues that it was the compromise that drove Florida's moderates into the camp of the radical Democrats, thus leading to secession. Other chapters, while well written and researched, do not add much to the book. Jonathan C. Sheppard provides a chapter on the Union capture of Amelia Island. This historical event was minor, even by Florida standards. A historian is always loath to say an event is so insignificant as to not warrant further study. However, the editors' choice of such an inconsequential episode for one of the book's few chapters on military history completely downplays the importance of military action in Florida during the Civil War. There were military events in Florida that played a role in the Civil War as a whole. The military actions surrounding Fort Pickens in Pensacola led directly to the outbreak of hostilities at Fort Sumter, just to name one encounter hugely more important than the capture of Amelia Island. Tracy J. Revels's chapter on Florida women could easily have been about any southern state. That the experience of women in Florida during the war was all but the same as in other states is not a criticism, but it is a common observation among historians and makes for an unenlightening chapter. So, too, with Robert A. Taylor's chapter "Florida Hispanics in the Civil War," which seems to be based on little more than going through the old muster rolls looking for Hispanic-sounding names. [End Page 452] The lone chapter dealing with race and Florida court cases is one of the weakest in the book. The entire chapter leads up to the postbellum Florida Supreme Court case Walker v. Gatlin (1867) and brings up the very interesting legal and financial question of whether future Florida governor David S. Walker owed James H. Gatlin money for a slave Walker had purchased prior to the outlawing of slavery. The problem is that the author, Chris Day, uses the case to discuss African Americans' pursuit of freedom and "activism in the courtroom" (p. 155). While it might have had that effect, the case was about money. The Democratic Party of Florida was extremely active in the postwar period in trying to control the freedpeople and make the social system as much as possible as it had been before the war. Day may have picked one of the few things not motivated by race during this period to write about. There are strong chapters. David Nelson, in the concluding chapter, examines how the Civil War and many of the war-related controversies are remembered in Florida. Like with most other southern states, Florida's memory of the Civil War was dominated by what...

Civil War Chicago: Eyewitness to History by Theodore J. Karamanski and Eileen M. McMahon

Reviewed by: Civil War Chicago: Eyewitness to History by Theodore J. Karamanski and Eileen M. McMahon Christopher R. Reed Theodore J. Karamanski and Eileen M. McMahon, Civil War Chicago: Eyewitness to History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014. 334 pp. $23.96 (paper). I have taught Civil War history with emphases on both the national and local scenes for years with a wish to see an anthology of the type that Karamanski and McMahon's Civil War Chicago: Eyewitness to History sets forth. In offering a reflection of Chicagoans' thinking and emotions, as expressed through their "fears, aspirations, and [perceived] challenges," the editors have done a masterful job of showing the city and its people as they met one gargantuan challenge and embarked on those to be presented in their future. Chicago as entrepot, production center, and transportation hub contributed mightily to the war effort and represented in microcosm the enormity of the conflict that resulted in making America whole and truly indivisible. Achieving national unity proved especially difficult, as the example of Chicagoans' mixed reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation illustrates. [End Page 154] One Illinois regiment, the 8th, could despise the document with its racially charged transformation of the white over black arrangement, while another, the 82nd, composed of Germans along with some Scandinavians and Poles, could support the liberal cause of abolitionism, oblivious to ethnic nationalism. The deplorable conditions at the Confederate Andersonville prisoner of war camp found their counterpart at Chicago's Camp Douglas, located along the south shore of Lake Michigan. This volume explores both Union and Confederate recollections with emphases on the hopelessness that existed, whether it was Northerners waiting for exchange when the pardon system was in effect, or Southerners becoming lost in an indefinite incarceration far from home. As the diet was once described, "the bacon was alive with maggots, the bread hard, sour, and black, and the sugar the color of Sand." Chicago buried thousands of Southerners on its lakeshore. Neither the divided sections, nor the nation was prepared for war. The war, in turn, stimulated Chicago in matters that almost forecast its rise to becoming the nation's second largest metropolis by the end of the nineteenth century. In its economic growth, political strength, and civic nationalism, Chicago rose above internal factionalism to unite at war's end in both triumph and sorrow. Although Karamanski and McMahon include much in their collection about such growth and development, they also include the matters concerning race around which so much tension and turmoil revolved. The city's small, almost miniscule, stable African American population contributed to the 29th Infantry Regiment, United States Colored Troops, which fought in the eastern theater of war in 1864 and was present at Lee's surrender. The unit's leader, John A. Bross, died at the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg. Likewise, the successful ending of the nefarious Illinois Black Code rested heavily on the shoulders of African American merchant-tailor John Jones, Chicago's "Old German." However, marginalization of the black population as a whole awaited its members after the war's end. The editors apply useful methodology, examining numerous issues of contemporary newspapers, from the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Times to the Rushville [Indiana] American, to tell their story. The addition of a central Indiana publication from the time of the horrendous Great Chicago Fire of 1871 illustrates deep post-war related feelings. That publication scolded Chicago and the North for their previous fits of exuberance over the [End Page 155] burning of Atlanta and destruction of the Shenandoah Valley. Likewise, the editors scoured countless manuscript collections and government records to build this valuable supplemental collection. In its comprehensiveness and in its effort to keep Civil War history alive to a twenty-first century generation, Eyewitness even includes in Chapter 9, "A Guide to Civil War Sites." Standing statuary and structures remind today's Americans of a conflict that brought a nation into political wholeness. Eyewitness provides both teachers and readers with an excellent supplement to James B. McPherson's general study, Battle Cry of Freedom, Victor Hicken's state study, Illinois in the Civil War, and Christopher Robert Reed's chapter on the Civil...

Русский бюллетень CNT-FAI как источник по истории Гражданской войны в Испании (по материалам российских и зарубежных архивов)

Русский бюллетень CNT-FAI как источник по истории Гражданской войны в Испании (по материалам российских и зарубежных архивов)

Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America's Civil War ed. by Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andrew F. Lang

Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America's Civil War ed. by Andrew S. Bledsoe and Andrew F. Lang